Disability Benefit Take-Up and Local Labor Market Conditions

Kerwin Kofi Charles; Yiming Li; Melvin Stephens

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00692

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Disability Benefit Take-Up and Local Labor Market Conditions

Kerwin Kofi Charles¹; Yiming Li²; Melvin Stephens³

¹ University of Chicago and NBER · ² University of Chicago · ³ University of Michigan and NBER

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2018 open access

Exploiting county-level variation in oil-producing areas from shocks to world oil and gas prices, we study how local labor market conditions affect disability take-up. We extend well-known previous work using a similar research design by analyzing a different price shock; a larger, more representative set of labor markets; and a more recent period marked by skyrocketing disability payments. Our estimated elasticity for SSDI payments with respect to earnings of −0.29 is surprisingly similar to earlier findings. Our preferred SSI elasticity estimate of −0.16 is smaller than previous findings, but we show that SSI programmatic changes explain most of the difference.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00692
Volume: 100 (3)
Pages: 416-423
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: openalex crossref